Fastnacht Parade

Jack took this picture this morning when I was preparing lunch for guests and had the window open to get rid of the smell of beans!  Yes, the big white door is the entrance to our building and the notice board beside it is for the Mennonite Church and Friedenshaus.  The next two windows are our bedroom, me in kitchen window and living room windows to the right.  No church this morning because of the Fastnacht parade!

We were both distracted by over 50 different police vehicles plus motorcycles and fire dept. vehicles.  They filled the school lot across from us, and then filled the street to the left and right!  We think maybe they were meeting for instructions for the day because after a couple of hours all but 8 left again.

These pictures are all taken from our windows.  We had an interesting meal in that there was almost always at least one of us up at the window, and often all of us!  We hadn't realized they'd get to our street so quickly (or that my roasted veggies took longer than I'd planned!).  So here are some of the sights.  There were lots of marching bands and cute little kids twirling and marching in addition to the floats.  The only really culturally different aspect was when one float from Loewenbrau handed out glasses of beer and another pub gave small cups of hot split pea soup!!

Can you tell that Jack ran out and took this wine truck facing our house?  It wasn't very crowded on our part of the street, but overall LU expected between 180,000 to 200,000 total spectators.

Alex had a skeleton outfit on and we all enjoyed getting candies and small pkg of tissues thrown into our windows!  They also threw small pkg of pretzels and of sweet popcorn.

If you're with me so far, you might want to check out some very short videos from our window perch.

 Note our great huge windows, which open like doors!  Whenever we opened it they'd try to throw us things.  Here it's tissues.

Hexe = Witch!!  Very elaborate, scary costumes and they "use" their brooms on spectators!

While this Hexe was "coming into" our living room window, another one was at the kitchen window.  She gave our Iranian neighbor, who was also visiting us, some candy and then quick as a wink threw huge amounts of confetti at Jack.  It covered the two of them and our floor!

Here she is with her stash :)

There were 99 floats, bands, clubs, etc.  Here is the tail end of happy followers.

Another cultural difference.  What do you think happened well within 5 minutes of the last float???  Watch!

Other cultural differences:  Fastnacht here in LU is much more innocent than Mardi Gras in New Orleans or Karnival in Brasil.  Jenny told us that at Halloween only very scary and gory costumes are worn here.